However, studies have shown that spiritual struggle is common among college students (Astin et al., 2004; A. N. Bryant & Astin, 2008), indicating that studying spiritual struggle, even in samples that may not identify as highly religious, is feasible. In the present sample, most students indicated they were at least slightly https://trading-market.org/nutrition-guide-for-addiction-recovery/ religious (64.1% at Time 1 and 59.2% at Time 2) and at least slightly spiritual (73.5% at Time 1 and 70.6% at Time 2). Ultimately all threats are existential threats, but just bits and pieces of this more massive threat. The huge burden that humans bear is the ability to contemplate our own annihilation—death.

In fact, negatively-valenced reappraisals of the traumatic event may fail to reduce the current perceptions of threat by merely redistributing the threat from human forces to spiritual ones. While a sense of spiritual emptiness is an experience familiar to many people, it is extremely common for those who struggle with addiction. While the absence of spirituality in no way causes addiction, it is generally accepted that addiction has a spiritual component. This acknolwedgement led to the incorporation of spirituality as an important ingredient in the process of recovery, and provides an important intersection between Western psychology and psychotherapy and twelve-step recovery.

The Spiritual Malady

These illustrate how the 12 step programme can help with an emotion dysregulation disorder. In these times personal threat load is extremely high and is being reflected in systemic dysfunction. In fact, the world’s threat load is extremely high and it, too, is being reflected TOP 10 BEST Sober Living Homes in Boston, MA January 2024 in systemic dysfunction. We are in a time where we need to proactively decrease threat and increase safety in the world. One is a mobilization response to threat where we can prejudge, react, attack, argue, criticize, blame, and experience interpersonal disconnections.

We can become aware that humility is not thinking less of oneself, but rather thinking of oneself less, and that we are worthy of self-compassion. Compassion for others means appreciating their pain and experiencing a heart-based response to it. Compassion evokes an interest in offering support, understanding, and kindness to others when they struggle, make mistakes, or fail. Self-compassion consists of responding the same way toward ourselves when we have a difficult time, act out on our personality challenges, or experience something we don’t like about ourselves. Having compassion for ourselves means that we honor our humanness with self-acceptance when we bump up against our limitations and fall short of our ideals. A potential difficulty with measuring spiritual struggle is its relative infrequency.

What Is Spiritual Malady and How Do We Become Well?

The CSLES has high test-retest reliability (Park, Cohen, & Carpenter, 1992; Sandler & Lakey, 1982) and has been used successfully with college students (e.g., Park, Cohen, & Herb, 1990). The present study aims to advance understanding of how spiritual struggle relates to PTSD symptoms. The prospective design illuminates how spiritual struggle in response to a trauma, as compared to a non-traumatic stressful event, relates to the development and maintenance of PTSD symptoms. Specifically, struggle and its separate components are investigated as potential mediators of the relationship between trauma and PTSD. The analyses control for pre-event PTSD symptoms to allow for examination of change in PTSD symptoms in response to the index event. Parallels between spiritual struggle and established (secular) negative cognitive responses to potentially traumatic events clearly exist, as does a small body of literature associating spiritual struggle with greater PTSD symptoms.